On Dec 9th, 1943 a Boeing B-17G-15-BO Flying Fortress with a crew of 10 on-board was flying from Goose Bay, Newfoundland to Prestwick, Scotland. It was coming up the Irish coast when it went down in bad weather at the top of Teivebaun mountain in Sligo. 3 died on the mountain and the other 7 were rescued by locals.

I took a trip up there the other day, its a pretty tough climb. Unfortunately there is not much left of the plane. The site has been scavenged many times and the engines were removed for the aviation museum. There is a lot of metal scattered around and a large wing and undercarriage section remain. This would have been a pretty big aircraft, it would be interesting to know where it all went to.

You can find the full story of what happened in this PDF that Dennis Burke put together. The directions in the PDF are rough and the crash site is hard to find. However, I had GPS so here is a map: Directions to crash site.

I took this photo last week at about 10pm while driving around. This is my favorite place on Lough Gill. There was a dense fog down and it made for a very strange and eerie scene.

We are the sheep but do we trust the shepherd? Or his dog for that matter… Happy Christmas.

Update (after some alcohol): Of course this does not make sense. The sheep are just afraid of the shepherd and his dog.

These two don’t care about how cold it is.

There was a really dense fog over town all day so this evening I walked up to where I took a previous photo. It was really weird, the town lights only went as far at the top of the fog, above that the sky was completely clear. Some circular distortion appeared on each shot which I believe are ‘Newton Rings’, I don’t know what caused it, is it possible to remove these in Photoshop etc? it was too cold to retake.

With temperatures dropping to -16c here the birds are starting to get very hungry. These starlings recently spent the afternoon dive-bombing our cat’s food bowl for nuts. They always look so angry. At one stage I kind of expected them to split into 3 in mid-air. I guess I have been playing too much of a certain game lately.

I did some visuals again for Conor at Citóg in the The Cellar on Friday night. Also playing were the excellent Loner Deluxe and DeclanQKelly. If you are looking for something to do any Friday night in Galway, head on down to these great free gigs.

Last night I drove through the small town where I went to secondary school. A new business has just opened there. Its hard to work out if John Healy would have seen this as progress or another nail in the coffin. Maybe the locals can look forward to some new houses in future. There are no shortage of reasons to be concerned. Anyway, for now I will lament the memory of a place that was once suitably detached.

Yesterday I got a gift of a Caffreys Big Time bar. Sweet! I had totally forgot about these. The sight of this caused a rush of ancient memories from somewhere at the back of my brain. This bar is one of my earliest memories.